Life Cycles and Brain Cycles: Finding God in the Body’s Journey Through Time

This essay was first published in the collection A God We Can Believe In (Wipf & Stock, April 2022), edited by Richard Agler and Rifat Sonsino.

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”

Robert Frost

Mirroring other inductive learning processes we undergo in our lives, it is helpful to first experience what God feels like in the brain and body before turning to the religious language that allegedly describes Divine encounters. In this order, Torah may take on new meaning that can offer us pathways to living lives of deeper fulfillment and contentment. By starting in the body, we can open the gates of access to God and religious language without first requiring abstract philosophical understanding. I believe this is the way religion and religious language developed originally, and that it is a helpful exercise for contextualizing and connecting with religious concepts in our own contemporary context.

I was first inspired to write theology by my beloved teacher Neil Gillman, of blessed memory, who imparted two heart-opening lessons to me. One was that he stopped believing many of the ideas he published in his seminal book on theology, which he corrected orally before assigning passages for his students to read. The second was that if he were to go back and redo college in his old age, he would have studied neuroscience instead of philosophy, since we cannot ask questions about knowledge until we first understand how it is our brains even formulate ideas.

Gillman’s first insight taught me that theology is dynamic, just as we are; his second taught me that God can be understood through observable frameworks that are built into nature. If epistemology presupposes an understanding of the brain, then theology presupposes an understanding of one’s own body. Faith follows, rather than precedes, experience. I don’t believe in God, as if God is an entity whose existence can be refuted. I experience God, and I read religious texts with the hope of articulating or clarifying the memory of that experience. We can (and must) use our bodies to access the disembodied concept of God. After all, the only way to leave a house is through an exit intentionally carved into the architecture of the building.

So what is that experience of the body that spawned robust religious traditions of prophecy, revealed wisdom, and an intricate system of behavioral norms? Certainly it is idiosyncratic, as is anything related to the body. But it is also a universal experience of the human nervous system that is accessible to all of us if only we attune our senses to be aware of it when it arrives. My own experiences of God fit into what Julie Holland would call triggering the parasympathetic nervous system.⁠1 This somatic experience is a mindset of clarity and calm, the grounded confidence I feel when I can think straight and perceive my environment with precision rather than presupposition. In this state of mind, I become aware of the acute subconscious functions of my body’s systems as they operate. It feels as though my consciousness aligns with the numerous natural processes of my body and surrounding environment, of being “at one” with nature. It is no irony that Judaism’s first theological innovation was the certainty that God is One—not that there is one God instead of many, but that the word God is synonymous with a feeling of unity.⁠2

Because of the stresses of modern life, many of us spend more time in fight-or-flight mode than we do in parasympathetic mode, and may even lack the language or awareness to distinguish between these two states of mind. Our cultural emphases largely fail to cultivate this kind of awareness in the developing minds of children, at least before pressure and anxiety build a nest in their consciousness, making it harder to conjure up this state of mind as they grow. Consequently, the first time someone becomes aware of this mindset might come as the result of a surprise encounter with nature, a trauma to the body or psyche, or a pharmacological reaction, without the proper integration strategies to comprehend the experience. Were we more familiar and intentional with this mental state, we might be quicker to call a person’s first encounter of this kind by its Biblical moniker: “Revelation.”

When the body is in a state of Revelation, a number of other things also happen. Objects appear as they are, rather than as the heuristics that serve as shortcuts for more efficient mental processing. Instead of seeing the flag of France, for example, a mind in this state might see three tall rectangles side by side; blue on the left, red on the right, white in between. It is simply the object as it is. Thoughts also feel clear and indisputable. We often experience a multiplicity of ideas and voices in our inner dialogue, making it hard to determine which is the “authentic” voice or the “correct” course of action. In this state of Revelation, the thoughts and ideas that arise feel centered and pure, almost as if they were coming from some Great Beyond, with a confidence and authority that could feel like Scripture.

Let us call that feeling in the body “God” and the insights that were revealed “Torah.” Once we have identified the experience (whatever it feels like in one’s own body) and terminology of God, we can finally have a conversation about theology. British novelist Philip Pullman explains that different texts demand different attitudes from their audiences. A courtroom jurist expects to determine whether the story they are hearing is true, but not whether it is literal or metaphorical.⁠3 When the Torah says “God spoke to Moses,” this does not have to mean that one man named God opened his mouth and uttered words to another man named Moses. It can mean that Moses experienced this powerful state of being, mentally clear and physically attuned, and paid close attention to the ideas that arose in that mindset.

When I study my own experiences of Revelation, I strive to recreate the precise environment of the encounter in order to return to that feeling. I think back to where and when and how I first experienced that Revelation, and I call this setting “Sinai.” Sinai is the details: Where was I? A particular room? Out in nature? Alone or with other people? How many people? What was the temperature? What was I wearing? What did the space smell like? Was I hungry? Had I already eaten? Was I speaking, or hearing sounds from someone else? What were the words, and what was the music? What had I been doing before I became aware of that feeling? What had I been thinking about? Did I ingest any substances that altered my brain chemistry? Which emotions was I feeling before this mindset settled upon me? How long did the experience last? What did I do after it ended?

The aesthetic recreation of revelatory moments is what we will call “ritual.” When we perform a ritual with the right intention and all the helpful ingredients of the senses, it actually changes our nervous system and makes us feel something shift in the body. Different rituals serve different functions; some are daily practices to help us embody this state of mind as regularly as possible. These we will call “prayer.” Others help us to enhance the experience of the passage of time. This is the annual holiday cycle.

But as Gillman taught, theology is contextual. Throughout the course of our lives, the dynamism of the human condition changes our relationship to these rites. Rituals that once worked consistently and reliably to recreate Divine consciousness when we were children suddenly stop working when we hit puberty; meanwhile ceremonies we could not imagine appreciating in young adulthood seem to resonate instantly when we marry or welcome children. The same is true upon our approach to death, when new embodiments of consciousness and a lifetime of cultivation invite even more profound encounters with the Divine. Since the sensory experience of our bodies changes as we move through chapters in our lives, it makes sense that the settings that helped induce that mindset also transform. A whole category of rituals is needed to help us process and mark the transitions between those chapters. Life cycle moments are just those rituals, and their religious pageantries mark for us the changing seasons of how we approach and relate to God. Our brains evolve as we age, which means the rituals we need to revisit Divine awareness evolve alongside. A bar/bat mitzvah is not just a coming-of-age ceremony; it is a transformation in the human nervous system, which means a transformation in the way we communicate with God. It is no wonder life cycle events are some of the most resonant and sustained rituals in all religious traditions.

Life cycle rituals mark not only the passage of time through human consciousness, but the passage of human consciousness through the course of time. Abraham Joshua Heschel and Franz Rosenzweig both understood that revelation “occurs in eternity, outside the realm of time altogether. Time, after all, is a category of human understanding that does not apply to God.”⁠4 Looking at the experience of the human life cycle, I might offer a reversal of this paradigm: God is a category of human understanding that does not apply to Time.

During the experience of a Divine encounter, it is not uncommon to feel that time has stopped or even jumped to the past or present, such that my consciousness seems to exist in multiple places and eras at once. The course of mortal life itself is an expression of God’s eternity compressed into the space-and-time-bound realm of the human experience. Ritualizing the passage of time affords us the opportunity to stand outside of that spacetime to witness it and experience the grounded awareness of (God) consciousness. In this way, God is the state of being so present in a particular moment that we, ironically, transcend the very idea of one moment.

We can look to the recent resurgence of mindfulness meditation practices in Western culture as one expression of the realignment of our bodies and awareness with what our religious traditions have long referred to as God. If the nervous system is our primary vessel for Divine communication, then intentional breathing and calming strategies are the latest fad rituals in our contemporary religious milieu. By expanding our definitions of religious language that we are accustomed to dismissing as primitive or supernatural, and by dislodging our thinking from the time-tested grooves in which we find comfort, we may discover God in ways we never thought possible. God, being a natural process built into the human genome, is available to us always and forever. Aligning the experience of God with scientific and religious language offers us a poetic framework and a set of tools that can enhance our experience of being alive. This is religion at its best.

1 For further reading see Holland, Julie. Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, from Soul to Psychedelics. Harper Wave, 2020.

2 For further reading on the neuroscience of feeling “at one” with nature, see: Vann SD, Aggleton JP, Maguire EA. What does the retrosplenial cortex do? Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009 Nov;10(11):792-802.

3 Pullman, Philip, and Simon Mason. “The Origin of the Universe,” Dæmon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling. Knopf, 2018. p. 68.

4 Sommer, Benjamin. Revelation & Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. Yale, 2015. p. 202.